Mobile Magic around the World

Sydney.
The second day of Mobile Media 2007 is now underway; we're starting with another double header of keynotes, and Genevieve Bell from Intel is the first speaker. Her focus is on the social, cultural, regulatory, and other contexts of mobile media developments, and she begins by asking what today constitutes a 'mobile device', given the multifaceted technological and other features of such devices - there is no fixed and stable notion of what that term describes. Such notions are also affected by wider developments in the discourses and conversations about mobile media, of course.

The future for mobile technologies is described by a variety of conflicting visions - of ubiquitous consumption using mobile technologies, of user-led networking creating wireless mesh networks, and of the embedding of mobile devices into all aspects of everyday life (indeed, there are now papier-mache replicas of mobile phones sold to be burnt in Chinese funerary rites, for use in the afterlife).

Genevieve highlights China as one of the key markets for mobile telephony at this point; some 400 million subscribers are currently using mobile phones, and that number keeps growing rapidly. Now that the language barrier has been addressed and Chinese characters are available for texting, providers like China Mobile have even begun to send out daily instalments of popular novellas to their subscribers. Urban China is now replete with public mobile phone charging stations, and the recharge load is putting increasing pressure on the still somewhat unreliable electricity networks.

Indonesia similarly had an aggressive ICT policy during the 1990s, and especially focussed on bridging the digital divide by providing access kiosks; having identified mosques as key public spaces in the country, the government developed (but for economic reasons did not implement) an e-mosque programme to deploy kiosks - this would introduce a very different sense of regulatory approaches than kiosks in different public spaces, of course. Similarly, in Cairo, the first wireless cloud in an Arab country was recently deployed, but this also became a religious question as uses for this technology were debated.

In New Zealand, a late effect of the Treaty of Waitangi (which granted Maoris rights over land and natural treasures) was that through the same logic Maoris also gained rights to a third of the airwave spectrum; such questions about airwaves and their ownership are a for of materialising the immaterial, turning this intangible resource into a property. This raises key questions about ownership and regulation, of course.

Additionally, in many countries around the world mobile devices are now enhanced with culture-specific tools - orienting the user towards Mecca using GPS, highlighting the start and end of fasting periods during Ramadan, or providing appropriate excerpts from the Koran - and indeed, religious uses are increasingly important for both mobile devices and Internet services. Further, phone users are also developing means of using mobile phones outside of approved uses - in Ghana, for example, mobile phones users avoid call charges by making calls but not picking up; the calling itself confers a message but does not accrue a cost; in London, the practice of peace-chalking has emerged to highlight spaces with poor connection (where users may go to escape constant connectivity).

Genevieve also points out some of the assumptions built into mobile technology (wireless routers are built to cover the size of the average American family home, for example, not the average Singaporean flat, creating all sorts of network overlap); satellite navigation devices cannot necessarily be trusted. Overall, this points out that there is no single, fixed meaning for mobile devices, and that cultural, social, legal, historical, political contexts all matter; this must be recognised in both studying and developing mobile technologies and their uses. Genevieve points to two leifmotifs in mobile culture: the invisible infrastructures which support it, and the frequent invocation of 'magic' as users describe the workings of their devices.

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